Partnership with Benetech, a non-profit organization that develops and supports Martus, secure information management software for human rights monitoring. 1
Benetech creates and develops new technology solutions that serve humanity, empower people, and address social justice questions. Benetech as several initiatives. The Global Literacy Program centers on Bookshare, a program for people with vision and reading disabilities. As part of this project, Benetech has formed the world's largest accessible digital library of scanned material. The Human Rights Program at Benetech produces Martus, a free and open source secure documentation software that allows users to encrypt, search, analyze, and back up their data to a secure network of servers. Providing the capacity to securely document stories of human rights abuses, Martus protects the identities of witnesses and the promotes safety of human rights defenders. Currently available in 13 languages, Martus has been downloaded in over 100 countries, and Benetech has trained Martus users in over 50 of those. The demand for Martus technology and training is rapidly growing. Our Mobile Martus app for Android provides capacity for unobtrusive, secure mobile data collection. Martus is the Greek word for witness. Benetech’s most recent initiative is Benetech Labs, an incubator project to identify big ideas and possible solutions to today’s major challenges. It’s where we begin to develop new technology— or enhancements to our existing technology — so that, ultimately, we can launch successful, useful, relevant tech tools for social good. Projects include Social Coding for Good which connects tech volunteers with nonprofit projects, and sustainability/environment focused work such as a clean water project in Latin America. 2
Benetech is based in Palo Alto, California and is a non-profit organization. Benetech is funded through the support of foundation and government grants as well as donations from individuals. The Human Rights Program is composed of six staff as well as associated engineering and training consultants that develop Martus, provide support to Martus users, and conduct outreach and training on Martus to those who would like to learn to use the program. The Benetech Human Rights Program released the first version of Martus in 2003 and has trained and supported Martus users all over the world since then. You can contact the Benetech Human Rights Program with questions or for assistance with troubleshooting Martus at any time by emailing martus@benetech.org. 3
Information is a human rights advocates greatest asset, but it must be protected and properly utilized. To better understand why Benetech developed Martus , let’s start in Guatemala. This is a picture of the National Police Archives in Guatemala containing millions of pages of police records that detail many of the happenings during Guatemala’s long internal conflict in the 1980s and 1990s, including about torture, killings, detentions, and other illegal practices committed by state authorities, largely against the Mayan peoples of Guatemala. You may have heard in the news that one of Guatemala’s former leaders was sentenced for his role in carrying out genocide during this time. The National Police Archive, and the information accidentally discovered within it nearly 10 years ago, was instrumental in providing the evidence necessary for the verdict. But, as one can see, this pile of evidence is vulnerable to theft, loss, and easy destruction. In paper form, it is also not easily searchable or possible to analyze. The National Police Archives painstakingly preserved and digitized this warehouse full of information and safely stored samples of the data in Martus in order to be able to preserve it, secure it, make it searchable, analyze it, and transform it into powerful evidence. That evidence helped provide the proof that led to a verdict of a prison sentence of 80 years for genocide and crimes against humanity for Guatemala’s former leader. One of the keys was securing the data, and that’s where Martus came in. 4
• Benetech designed Martus to serve organizations and situations like the National Police Archives, in which human rights advocates and defenders need to preserve, backup, and secure their information – keeping unauthorized viewers out while at the same time being able to get their information back in the event of a theft or attack. When Benetech asked its human rights partners what they would need from an information management program designed specifically for human rights, they gave Benetech this wish list. They said that the program would need to be: • Easy to use • Affordable • Easy to customize • Offer flexibility with data sharing • Include backup servers for safeguarding information • Provide the ability to search and report on information 5
So, Benetech created Martus to meet all these needs: • In its efforts to make Martus as widely accessible as possible, Martus is absolutely free and can be downloaded on the https://martus.org website. • Martus is also open- source, which means that the program’s source code is published and freely available for anyone to use, review, or build upon, as well as verify that the software does exactly what it says it does. Open source software means you don’t have trust the developers – you can verify that you both have the *real* software and that it actually does what it says it does. You can contrast this with Skype for example. Skype uses encryption and it’s free, but it is owned by Microsoft, we can’t see the code behind the software, and therefore we can’t verify that it does what it says it does. Contributing to and drawing on the open source community is an important part of who Benetech is. • Martus prioritizes security and uses standard encryption - like that which is often used by banks or sites like Google - not only when your data is in transit, but also when it is on your local device or on the Martus servers. Encryption is a way to obscure data so that it is only readable by authorized people. • Finally, Martus offers a way to store, standardize, organize, search, and share digital information, making it a useful tool to transform information into useful evidence . 6
These are some of the logos of the many organizations that have worked with the Benetech Human Rights Program over the last ten-plus years. We look forward to working with you! 7 7
The following screenshots offer a quick visual overview of the functionality of Martus, but an in-person training can provide more examples of how Martus can be used successfully for your project. 8
Martus data entry format templates are customizable, so you can shape your form to match the data you are collecting and any interview/intake forms you are already using. Martus allows various field types, including text fields, drop down menus, checkboxes, multi-item lists, date and date range fields, among others. 9
For each Martus record, you can attach as many files you would like, of any size, and of any file type. This includes video files, but remember, when backing up to the server, sending a video over the internet will be expensive and will take a long time (imagine uploading a 1GB video file to Dropbox or Google Drive – same thing when ending a Martus record with a 1GB file attached). 10
On your computer, all of the data in your Martus account is stored encrypted, so that only you or someone you designate can read it. Martus uses the same encryption methods for data being sent to and downloaded from the server that major banks and commercial websites use to protect their data. PGP is an open source standard that has been around for many years, and Martus uses the same methods. 11
Martus encrypts record data in multiple ways. It encrypts the DATA on your machine, before it’s ever sent to a server. And, it encrypts the CONNECTION itself, so that snooping attackers cannot see what information is being sent or received by either end. Even if they were able to decrypt the connection (which is very, very hard), all they would see is that encrypted data is being sent to or received from the server. And the data also stays encrypted on the servers so that nobody, including Benetech or server operators, can read the data. 12
This is a VERY basic example of encryption, illustrating the IDEA of encryption. THIS IS NOT THE TYPE OF ENCRYPTION MARTUS USES. If it did, the encryption could be cracked instantly. Instead, Martus uses very, very advanced encryption methods that change the original data into something unreadable and indecipherable without the decryption key. 13
This is what your data encrypted inside Martus looks like. Data encrypted in Martus can only be decrypted and viewed inside Martus and only by the Martus account in which it was created, or anyone that you have authorized to decrypt and read it. If you try to open the encrypted files on your computer that contain the data in your Martus records outside of Martus, this is what you will see. You can see that there is data, but you can’t read it. In the event that an attacker or authority were to gain access to the Martus server, this is also what they would see: there is data, but it’s unreadable. 14
Benetech makes servers available for free to Martus users. Currently, there is no limit to the amount of data you are allowed to back up on the server, and servers “mirror” each other several times a day, so there is a backup of your backup. 15
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